The food service industry consumes both an enormous quantity and great diversity of packaging, and particularly cartons or boxes, for food products. In commercial food production, cartons are formed at the packaging manufacturer on specialized automated equipment; are delivered to food processing facilities; and are filled and closed, usually in a highly automated fashion with additional specialized and automated closing equipment. However, in retail food service establishments such as fast food restaurants and specialty food shops such as confectioners, bakeries, groceries, and caterers, it is rarely practical from either an economic or logistical standpoint to employ specialized automated equipment to fill and close food cartons. Instead at such retail food service establishments, the food packaging process is manually performed. Several of the most common types of packaging are described below:
Formed, Prefolded and Glued Cartons:
Many styles of cartons may be formed then glued at the packaging converter on specialized equipment. Also, some types of cartons may be molded (shaped) from suitable materials, even though many suitable molding materials are foams or plastics that may not be environmentally friendly. To minimize space requirements at the user's location, the cartons may be designed to nest within one another when stacked. When a need arises for one of these preformed cartons, one is selected, filled with one or more food items, and manually closed, typically with some type of latching apparatus constructed in the lid or in one or more of the side walls. Even though preformed cartons may be nested and packed to reduce space requirements, such cartons are both more voluminous than the flat carton style blank packs (or bundles) and the nested styles require shipping in corrugated boxes. Conversely flat carton style blanks can be shipped with only plastic wrap packaging, and have only minimal amounts of empty space within the wrapped package.
Folded Carton Blanks/Glued and Unglued:
Alternatively, folded carton blank styles of paperboard (or other similar fibrous materials) may be obtained from a packaging converter and processed by automated folding and sealing apparatuses at the food processing facility to create cartons ready for loading and locking. Many cartons of this same style are also employed in the retail food service industry, and such cartons are preferably supplied in configurations so that the retail establishment does not require excessive space to store these types of cartons. This box style is particularly common with boxes (that due to size or structural and performance needs), cannot be easily nested (vertically stacked inside one another). However, the manual preparation of cartons at retail food service outlets diverts valuable employee time from the preparation and service of food. Some of these box styles can be prefolded and stored in a collapsed state and then opened and erected into their useful carton shape, usually with some further interlocking to maintain the shape, and thereby minimize the time required to create a useful carton from a flat blank (see FIGS. 1a & 1b). However, most designs for collapsible cartons have foldable and multi-part bottom panels that are not suitable to hold many food products. Such multi-part bottom cartons are characteristic of “perimeter type” blanks.
Conventionally, such a perimeter type box or carton is manufactured from a sheet of relevant material in a number of stages. First, the sheet is cut and creased to form the carton blank. The cuts and creases mark out the relevant portions of the carton panels that will form the carton's front, rear and side walls, its top and bottom surfaces, and any necessary flaps, tongues and slots, and so provide the blank with the shape that will define the resulting carton. The cuts and creases are also located to enable the basically flat sheet to be folded in the way required to construct the desired three dimensional carton. The perimeter construction usually requires one flap-part of the blank to be permanently affixed, by glue or staples for instance, to another part (usually one of the areas of the blank defining a wall panel of the carton). The next stage is to effect this affixation and the blank is conveniently designed so that this can be done with only a single fold of the blank and in such a way that a flat, easily stored, collapsed version of the carton results. Finally, for use, the folded and affixed blank is opened up and then further folded along the provided creases so as to move the wall and top and bottom portions into their required carton-defining positions. A typical example of a perimeter type blank for an exemplary box is shown as FIG. 1a, while FIG. 1b shows the box erected from that blank. It can be seen that the perimeter type construction leads to openings in the bottom of the carton between the multiple panels that form the bottom surface, and this structure does not lend itself to creation of an economical leak-resistant carton.
Flat Carton Blanks/Unglued:
Pizza boxes are a common example of this box style used in a retail food service packaging application. In contrast to the perimeter type blank, a typical pizza box is of a “base type” construction with a central panel to form the bottom of the carton and having wall and top panel extensions disposed around the base. However, this design is both time consuming to assemble and lacks leak resistant corners. A blank suitable to construct a base type pizza box is depicted in FIG. 2a and the carton constructed from that blank is shown in FIG. 2b. However, the base type blanks can be unnecessarily complicated. It is difficult to provide a leak resistant carton of base type construction that can be quickly assembled on an as needed basis.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved carton designs and methods of assembly suitable for use in retail food service settings. The present invention provides, in various embodiments, one or more of a carton blank, a carton folding aid, and a method of carton forming adapted to allow retail food service business to create leak resistant cartons from blanks in an efficient and economical fashion.